Is Science Dead in the Muslim World?

Share

Is Science Dead in the Muslim World?

Though Muslim math, science and medicine flourished while the West was mired in the Dark Ages, followers of Islam have not produced a single major discovery since, writes Quaid-e-Azam University physics professor Pervez Hoodbhoy.

Cognizant of their slowed development, many Muslim countries have increased science funding in recent years, and wealthy individuals have put aside part of their own fortunes. But will this be enough? He cites 19th century scholar Max Weber, who

claimed that Islam lacks an "idea system" critical for sustaining a scientific culture based on innovation, new experiences, quantification, and empirical verification. Fatalism and an orientation toward the past, they said, makes progress difficult and even undesirable.

Hoodbhoy then goes on to quantify Muslim scientific output (generally low, though agriculture and the military have benefited) and the dull tenor of intellectual debate as religious conservativism becomes part of everyday life. Finally he describes the rise of anti-scientific fundamentalists, much like those seen on the fringes of American science-religion debates – only in the Islamic world, they're mainstream.

Similarly, in the mass media of Muslim countries, discussions on "Islam and science" are common and welcomed only to the extent that belief in the status quo is reaffirmed rather than challenged. When the 2005earthquake struck Pakistan, killing more than 90 000 people, no major scientist in the country publicly challenged the belief, freely propagated through the mass media, that the quake was God's punishment for sinful behavior.

So what's the reason for the arrested development of Muslim science?It's not the exclusion of women, Hoodbhoy notes, nor the absence of democracy, without which science has previously done just fine, or an unwillingness to accept new technology, which Muslims have embraced in a religious context. Instead it's the dominance of traditional "modes of thought and social behavior."

Science is fundamentally an idea-system that has grown around a sort of skeleton wire frame—the scientific method. The deliberately cultivated scientific habit of mind is mandatory for successful work in all science and related fields where critical judgment is essential.Scientific progress constantly demands that facts and hypotheses be checked and rechecked, and is unmindful of authority. But there lies the problem: The scientific method is alien to traditional, unreformed religious thought. Only the exceptional individual is able to exercise such a mindset in a society in which absolute authority comes from above, questions are asked only with difficulty, the penalties for disbelief are severe, the intellect is denigrated, and a certainty exists that all answers are already known and must only be discovered.

Wired Science has hosted a lot of science-and-religion debates, but always within a context of Christianity. Any Moslim scholars out there think Hoodbhoy is right? Wrong? What's to be done about it?